As a search engine marketer, one of the most important aspects of my job is getting clients exposure on the web. There are literally hundreds of ways to accomplish this, as anyone who has done SEM research will tell you. Facing such an abundance of information can be daunting, and it can also make formulating a plan of attack much more challenging. So how exactly should one begin their SEM campaign? My research has shown me that one of the quickest, and by far the most beneficial, ways to start a campaign is by building a sitemap.

During their never-ending pursuit to index the world, Google began experimenting with sitemaps in June of 2005. For those of you that don’t know, a sitemap is an XML documents that contains a list of all pages hosted on a website. In addition, the sitemap also details when pages were last updated, and how important a particular page is in relation to other pages on your site. This, if you haven’t figured it out already, is huge when it comes to getting your web site indexed.

Typically search engines discover web pages by sending out spiders that follow links, this is also known as crawling the web. The spider then reports back to the search engine all the pages that it has found, which are then indexed. This method, while it works, is inefficient. Who is to say that every page on the Internet has an inbound link with which the spider can discover them by? Google understood this pitfall, and began working on a better way to index the web. Thus the sitemap was born. The thought is this, why go out and actively find pages to index when you can have those pages come to you? Although this requires a little more effort by the webmaster, it also allows the webmaster to indicate exactly what pages he or she wants indexed, and how often those pages should be re-crawled for updated content.

For a webmaster, the benefits of building a sitemap are tremendous. But how exactly does one create a sitemap? There are two ways this can be accomplished. The first, and often most complete way, is to run a script in the root of your web directory that reads every file therein. While this method allows for a complete listing of pages, providing you have a website with static content, it requires the ability to run a script on the hosting server, which isn’t a possibility for everyone. The second method, which is more commonly used, is to have a third party website crawl your site and create a sitemap for you. If all the pages on your site are linked well to one another (use caution with DHTML or javascript links), then this method will work just as well. If the inter-linking of the website is not set up well, then having a third party website crawl your site will be subject to the same pitfalls that a search engine would experience, as previously discussed. Below are three resources that will help you to create your sitemap.

Script based solution:https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html
Website based solution: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Other solutions: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

Alright, so now you’ve created a sitemap, or at least know how to. The next step is to submit your sitemap to the search engines. Up until about two weeks ago Google was the only search engine that worked with sitemaps. Fortunately both Yahoo and MSN have recently followed suit, and now you can submit that same sitemap to all the major search engines. This, again, is great news for you as a webmaster. Before the end-user is able to find your website, the search engine must know that you exist, and building/submitting your sitemap is by far the quickest way accomplish that. Once you are indexed, the next step is to get your site decently ranked in the search engines, but lets save that for another post.

For more information on building your sitemap and the various protocols you will need to follow, check out www.sitemaps.org. This site is co-run by Google, MSN, and Yahoo (I know, its mind boggling). There you can find up to date information on the sitemap protocol and the answers to many frequently asked question regarding sitemaps.

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